Using Your Active Rain Blog to Drive Traffic to your Website - Is It Kosher?

Hi Patricia Kennedy - Great Feature! Congratulations!  I personally don't like being redirected for the purpose of being redirected.

That being said.....

I use the "wikipedia" approach when providing links. I have very rich content on my website. I had to add categories for my blog articles with a search bar so that the info could be found easily. I provide links for reference and for IDX.  If you want to know more about Sedona or me or the real estate market as well as info on the areas or events - you will probably find a link!

I keep my profile updated and my website pages updated. Trying to stay on top of Google algorithms is just plain crazy to me so I don't!  If I get rankings organically because of the content, I am fine with that. 

My intent is for providing information, not driving the viewer to the website for the sake of traffic!  Let's face it! That does not get you leads or improve your reputation. 

The internet can be a very tough place to trust, espeically with a lot of fake news websites these days. Luckily we have a safe and trustworthy community here at ActiveRain :). Informative and keep on blogging!

Hi Patricia, I agree with you that it is usually best to tell the full story in your AR post, and not re-direct to another site for the "rest of the story." 

I've also heard that there may not be so much of a "duplicate content" penalty by the search engines these days so, why cut one's effort short?!

John

I don't welcome click bait on any platform, and ActiveRain is no exception.  There are ways to drive traffic to a site without clickbait.  I've unfollowed several people that have a habit of great headlines/titles, with nothing more than clickbait in the body of their blog

I blog for business--that's always been my purpose for being here. I have over 2,0000 backlinks from AR to my website. These links do push my site up in the rankings. After all, Google loves ActiveRain and recognizes it as a reliable real estate source.

However, my posts here are written to be stand alone content, not merely links to another site. By doing this I rank in several spots on Google for content.

Below is a screen shot of the search term, What's My Franklin TN Home Worth? I opened an incognito window to perform the search so my browser wouldn't skew the rankings. As you can see, I rank in 2 spots for my website and 3 additional spots for ActiveRain which means I hold spots 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 on page one of Google for this search term; 5 of the 10 organic spots.

That's why we want to provide content here. Writing a few sentences and then linking to the original post doesn't achieve all the things we desire.

Right on Patricia! Slimy tactics are never appreciated!

I like your two cents, Patricia. I completely agree with you, too. 

Just for a little devil's advocate here... but I do see the value. My suspicion is that people are doing the bait and switch in order to garner better SEO from Google.  I don't personally do the bait and switch...choosing instead to reblog my entire blog here from my site, and add my website link on the bottom.  Even if the content is for the public but I have a member's only blog - it all gets reblogged here.  The reason why I do that is so that Google Trackers will see my website mentioned on another big page that receives a lot of traffic - like Active Rain - and recognize it to give me greater natural SEO.  Now I'm not a SEO expert, and I'm not sure what that does to a person's SEO if they've done the bait/switch, but I have to imagine that the traffic actually going to the site helps even more... even if it seems unethical in a lot of ways.

Don't kill the messenger! I'm not saying it's right or wrong... just pointing out the (possible) reasoning behind it!

I haven't noticed that! Thanks for bringing it up.  I would be annoyed as well if I had to click a link to finish the blog..going to the personal website.

A very thought provoking post!  Thank you.